The Point?

As the exhibition aproaches things seem to be starting to pull together. People are working now on work to be exhibited, and the studio is far more active as people work is no longer the beginings of ideas and experiments, but much more finished, clear "art."

This is strange to me in a way as, what with doing an animation, I have not had this sudden jump as such. It has just been a gradual build up of seconds. Maybe it will change when I exhibit it, as the instalation element to my piece will begin to take shape. I plan to install a toilet as a seat to watch the film on. I have been promised said toilet by a girl on the course who yesterday was wanting to give up all together with the whole exhibition. Fingers crossed I gets me toilet.

What has begun to come clear as I have seen every one elses work come together, is that i'm doing something a bit weird, and I have even begun to question slightly wether my own work is really art. I have though slightly, am I selling myself short with this? For one it is an animation, yet not in the traditional "arty" sense. If we look at this video by animator and director Stephan Irwin, then we see such a high level of skill and inovation. The way that he plays with traditional, fairly low-fi and basic animation, yet pull it together, connecting up small "screens"of animation, and using them to tell the narrative is truely ingenious.


My animation is not like this. It is crude and not beautifull. It is childish in its rude humour, and animated, though to the best of my abilities, relativly basicly.

However this self-questioning has lead me back to my original intention, that perhaps where not a clear in my head as they maybe are now. I never intended to Produce a highly polised piece of animation, nor did I want to produce something interlectual or refined. I realise now that it was through my disolutionment with the whole concept of fine art in itself that I was compelled to to do art. this was the point of Tom Armstrong does a Film in the first place. I intend to does a film and film I has does.

To contextually justify this let us look for a moment at Fischli and Weiss. I was just now watching a programme on the television about the 10th aniversarry of the Tate Modern, and This work came up.

FISCHLI, Peter
WEISS, David
Untitled (Tate)
Acrylic paint on polyurethane foam and mixed media Dimensions variable

It seemed to justify my own intention to myself. This work is stupid. It is pointless and dumb, a complex process for an ordinary outcome. And this is what I like about it. I remeber seeing it myself, quite a while ago, and indeed to this day I did not know that it was all polestyriene. Thats quite a long wait for a punchline. And thats what it feels like, a puchline to a joke.
OK so its a bit of a pretentious joke you could argue. but who care? not that many pople really care about art anyway.